Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Spewing Bile

Grognardia posted a little something-something today that really raised my hackles…completely unintentionally I’m certain. I wrote a very long and not-at-all-vulgar-but-definitely-possibly-offensive comment that I then deleted. Who am I to rain on someone’s parade of love for AD&D2?

But this is MY blog…and I can say what I damn well please over here.

I loathe AD&D2E…I hate it with a passion that is only matched in strength by my utter disdain of 4th Edition “D&D” (if you want to apply the moniker to that stinking heap). I’ll keep this short so we can get back to my fairly constructive posts on the wonderment of D&D and using RPGs to build “community” (yes, I am well aware of the irony of my own absurd hypocrisy).

Here’s the REAL skinny: once upon a time, D&D was actually, hard-to-believe-but-yeah, kind of cool. Hip college kids played it. Older siblings played it. Your “cool uncle” played it. Young men and women would get together around a table, drink some wine, and dungeon crawl. Things were dark, dangerous, and closer to their pulp roots even as the RPG moved away from its “wargame” roots.

Sometime in the mid-to-late 80s, this changed. Maybe it was the ousting of Gygax from the company. Maybe it was the new direction under new management. Hell, maybe it was Bush(senior) being in the White House. Certainly, the Republican conservatism infecting the nation since Reagan took office in 1980 didn’t help (with Nancy! Don’t forget Nancy).

AD&D stopped being hip. Hell, it even stopped being “a game you have to be pretty smart to play” as one adult described it to me as a kid. Instead it became nerdy, the height of un-cool. A refuge for outcasts looking for an escape from a society they had difficulty fitting into.

Personally, I’d never had a problem fitting into society. I WAS smart, but I also played every team sport offered at my school. I participated in all the extracurricular activities offered. I was the (romantic) lead in my school musical, an honors student, an altar boy…hell I was a “captain” of the school patrol. I had many friends, male and female, AND I was a rabid D&D gamer.

So it was strange to me when my gaming hobby suddenly branded me a social outcast. Wow…quite a switcheroo.

Anyway, AD&D2E was THE albatross that brought down TSR. It was the culmination of the company’s “dumbing down” of the game. Basically, they invited the kids in to play what had once been an adult’s game.

Gone were the pulp fiction roots (throw out “mental powers” and make the game strictly "high fantasy").

Gone was the griminess of scurrilous rogues looking to loot forbidden tombs and lost cities.

Instead gamers were condescended by the "powers that be." Adventure modules became avenues into the company’s published fiction. Plots were railroaded to ensure “good stories got told.” Whole campaign worlds were published…as if we weren’t smart enough to create our own worlds of adventure!

And juvenile is the key word. Even as they started losing long-time players, they started appealing to a different demographic…the young, horny teenage male demographic wanting to be super-heroes in a fantasy world. Gar-BAGE, says I!

D&D juvenile? It was created by adults for adults. Not by adults for kids, as far as I’m aware. At least not the original “Advanced” version.

There’s a reason a bunch of us jumped ship to games like White Wolf’s “gothic punk” mess that had nothing to do with wanting to wear capes or start LARPing. For me, it was looking for something a little more mature and "edgy."I hate 2nd edition. I’m sorry, but I really do. I’ve tried to like it. I purchased all the core books circa late 90’s but I sold them all back within a couple years. I was in the game store this weekend, checking out the “Greater Mummy” description in the 2nd Edition Monster Manual and you know what? It did absolutely nothing for me. Nada.

To all you players of the 2nd edition: I love you all, really. My bile is meant for the game you enjoy, not for you yourselves. I realize that I have an attachment to a certain way of playing and you are certainly welcome to enjoy your game in your own way. I know many of you are “all grown up now” anyway, and so if you’re still playing 2E you may well have taken your gaming to more mature levels…perhaps moreso than AD&D2 ever intended to offer…and if so, of course I’m glad. Hell, I’m just happy that some people are still interested in table-top gaming at all!

6 comments:

I cut my teeth on AD&D2, but I was in fact a kid when I started playing it. I haven't played 2nd edition in many years and these days I find the pulpier, badly-drawn-harpy-bits and diagrams of glyphs and circles and assassins and half-orcs to be more commensurate with my tastes.

To all you players of the 2nd edition: I love you all, really. My bile is meant for the game you enjoy, not for you yourselves. I realize that I have an attachment to a certain way of playing and you are certainly welcome to enjoy your game in your own way.

This is the way to approach it. There are lots of games that aren't to my taste, but I don't go around proclaiming myself morally or intellectually superior to those who do (honestly, do the people who work themselves up into a masturbatory frenzy over the edition wars realize just how incredibly fucking stupid they come off as?).

That said, sorry, but D&D was never 'cool'. It may well have had a larger (and perhaps wider) base of players, but it was always a geeky, nerdy hobby. It's not like the jocks and cheerleaders in high school were secretly wishing they were D&D players instead...

AD&D stopped being hip. Hell, it even stopped being “a game you have to be pretty smart to play” as one adult described it to me as a kid. Instead it became nerdy, the height of un-cool. A refuge for outcasts looking for an escape from a society they had difficulty fitting into.

@ Knightsky & Dyson:it's quite possible my experience was warped by living far away from the midwest (i.e. the epicenter of TSR). When I was a kid, the cool older kids were the ones that played D&D. I was gifted my first DMG by my (attractive) aunt's suave boyfriend of the time. But perhaps he was getting out of the game...that would have been around 1984 or '85.

As a kid through middle school, I gamed with female players as well as male. In high school, this was NOT the case. In college (1991-95) there were women-folk again, but they were NOT playing AD&D...none of us were.

"It's not like the jocks and cheerleaders in high school were secretly wishing they were D&D players instead..."

Funny story: a fair number of them wished exactly that, but either didn't want to admit to their friends that it sounded cool or didn't know anyone who played. Now that high school and its attendant BS are long in the past, I've gamed with at least three of them now, two of whom are now hopeless RPG addicts.